The English language is constantly changing, and the Internet is no small part of that. If you’ve ever wondered why that is, and what the changes look like, here are five sites worth exploring.

From the changing way that Reddit users are speaking to what your tweets mean to the robots that might someday replace human writers, these sites all give you another way to think about language. Let’s get started.

Do you ever wonder how language is changing? Which words are becoming more, and less, common? Randy Olson and Ritchie King of statistics blog FiveThirtyEight archived around 1.7 billion Reddit comments so you can find out. You can discover all sorts of things by searching for words and seeing how often they’re used in Reddit conversations. For example: “whoa” used to be more common than “woah”, but the two words are now at parity:

Why? I can’t begin to answer, because to me “whoa” is clearly superior. I guess I’m just an old-timer. Get off my lawn.

Your language can reveal a lot about you, whether you mean it to or not. AnalyzeWords is a site that can scan any Twitter feed and show you a bit about what your word choice says about you. Here’s a quick look at my Twitter timeline:

Apparently I’m more analytic than sensory, and I’m also pretty spacey. But you knew that already. What’s more interesting is the research behind this site. Apparently studies show that “junk words have proven to be powerful markers of peoples psychological states.” The site explains:

When individuals use the word I, for example, they are briefly paying attention to themselves. People experiencing high levels of physical or mental pain automatically orient towards themselves and begin using I-words at higher rates. I-use, then, can reflect signs of depression, stress or insecurity.

You probably use words in two forms: spoken and written. One of the most widespread alternatives to those forms is American Sign Language, the native language of hundreds of thousands of people. If you want to get an idea of how that language works, the ASL dictionary is a good place to start. It has videos for almost every word you can imagine.

The vast majority of words you use, day-to-day, are among the most common 1,000 words in the English language. But what would it be like to only use those words? Randall Monroe of XKCD famously stretched this to the limit with his Up Goer Five comic, which explains the Saturn Five Rocket using only those words.

He recently put out an entire book, Thing Explainer, based on the same concept. If you want to try such writing out yourself, you can use his Simple Writer app:

Someday writers like me will be completely out of a job, replaced by computer algorithms. It probably won’t be Content Forever that does that. This site lets you enter any word, specify a time range, and get a meandering essay that ties one paragraph together to another in a way that kind makes sense, sort of (not really).

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Laurie

December 17, 2015 at 2:57 pm

I tried to just ramble and not talk about anything complicated, but I was amazed that some pretty basic verbs weren't "common". The experiment made me realize that 1000 is actually not a very large number of words.

Justin Pot is a technology journalist based in Portland, Oregon. He loves technology, people and nature – and tries to enjoy all three whenever possible. You can chat with Justin on Twitter, right now.